17 Dec 24 | United States
In the name of “free speech”, Donald Trump has laid out an authoritarian plan for his new administration to radically defund and gag universities. Now with a Republican Congress, he might just achieve it all and that spells disaster for freedom of thought, critical inquiry and an informed citizenry in the USA.
Trump’s plan is based on the education chapter within the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s 900-page political roadmap Project 2025, a set of policy proposals that lay out a long-term ultra conservative vision. The chapter is written by Lindsey Burke, director of the organisation’s Center for Education for Policy.
First on the list is dismantling the Department of Education, a realistic threat now Republicans have both the House and Senate. Trump has put a wrestling magnate in charge of the department, Linda McMahon. She was formerly head of the US Small Business Administration and is currently chair of the America First Policy Institute, McMahon financed Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden with its notoriously bigoted speakers, according to Forbes. She will play a key role in rolling out plans that will profoundly shift power to reinforce historical social inequities in universities. These could include reversing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, privatising student loans and halting loan forgiveness.
Trump’s radical overhaul includes defunding universities that he considers to be “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathisers of many, many different dimensions” by taxing, fining and suing private university endowments (funds or assets donated to universities to provide long-term financial support).
Trump sees Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that such schools have engaged in as “unlawful discrimination” and he is seeking “restitution” through the law. He plans to “pursue federal civil rights cases” and increase the tax against these schools. During his first presidency, Trump signed a new plan that introduced a 1.4% on endowments of private universities with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets for every full-time student.
America’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard (which rely greatly on federal funds) will be prime targets. Following a wave of pro-Palestine protests – which were already subdued with arrests and brutality – there was conservative backlash. This prepared the ground for the coming lawfare aimed at punishing higher education institutions for wrong-think. For example, according to The Guardian, Steve Scalise, House majority leader, has discussed plans to punish universities that allow pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation.
With the spoils raised by stripping these educational institutions, Trump will fund a new American Academy. While he describes it as “non-political”, Trump’s ideological agenda is clear: “no wokeness or jihadism allowed”. Trump explains that American Academy will “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free”.
In what sounds troublingly like generative AI driven education, delivery of “content” will be through “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing”. There is no mention of professors or teachers.
There is little detail on the curriculum – so what kind of “content” will be considered “human knowledge” worth teaching? Trump’s scientific beliefs raise concerns. For example, he has previously said: “One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.”
The role of “industry partners” is left vague but we should be asking whether companies delivering content through “breakthrough” technology could gain access to students’ behavioral data for training AI. Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, forewarns of the dismantling of recent AI oversight efforts and an incoming merger of tech and state power where “the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy”.
With Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), my fear is that we could see emerging education policy influenced by the view that AI is a neutral tool for “free speech”, which can replace “unnecessary” educators.
Trump’s own past forays into the education sector don’t inspire confidence in his motives. In 2004, he set up “Trump University” as a for-profit initiative and real estate training programme, which claimed to share the secrets to being a successful entrepreneur. It faced several lawsuits, including allegations that Trump University defrauded its students through misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Despite the organisation never admitting wrongdoing, Trump settled the lawsuits, paying 6,000 defrauded victims a $25 million settlement in 2016 shortly after being elected president.
American Academy appears to be designed to extract power from the academe and weaken education, rather than strengthen it. It will compete with universities while its free online courses will be “equivalent” to a bachelor’s degree, accredited, and recognised for federal employment – which will itself further degrade government by hollowing out expertise.
Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Trump has said he will use executive orders to rescind or rewrite regulations, which could be used to undo stronger Biden-era Title IX protections against sexual harassment in universities and colleges. Executive orders are a powerful presidential tool enabling swift changes to federal policies and priorities without the approval of Congress – but they also have the potential for abuse of power. All this accompanies recent efforts to casualise the employment of professors, and weaken the tenure system, which ensures they cannot be removed easily and protects unpopular research, teaching and speech.
As university endowments are purged and their federal resources become contingent on pleasing ideological gatekeepers, it is hard to imagine brave or rigorous research can survive in the hollowed-out husks that remain. Once universities begin losing students to AI-delivered “free degrees” this will of course accelerate the roll-out of EdTech across the sector, resulting in declining educational standards and heightened surveillance in the name of “efficiency”. And should dissenters rise up, student protests will be stifled or exploited to legitimate further attacks on their institutions.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently stated that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
This “revolution” is not without casualties, however: many of America’s more privileged intellectuals will flee this war to financial stability or intellectual freedom overseas, but minority, dissident and refugee academics will be most vulnerable to harassment, insecurity and displacement. It will polarise inequality in an existing two-tier education system: community colleges and non-elite universities won’t survive.
Universities specialising in specific subjects, such as disinformation, will also continue to be uniquely targeted. In 2022 Trump threatened that “within hours” of his inauguration, he would sign an executive order “banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information’.
The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling may disrupt these plans somewhat, as it reaffirmed that technology researchers are independent and have First Amendment rights to carry out their work, and communicate it with the public, companies and the government. Yet, while some rights can be defended in the courts, legal battles take time, and great damage can be done in the meantime. Technology and disinformation researchers continue to face relentless political pressure, harassment, obstruction and lawfare.
The USA was once considered one of the world’s strongest defenders of academic freedom and free expression. While this was always a romanticised perception in an unequal system, Trumpism over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in US academic freedom. Attacks on US higher education have already begun, and the USA has fallen below more than 70 other countries in the Academic Freedom Index Update. Universities are pre-emptively ditching inclusivity practices in anticipation of Trump’s policies – but they must not “obey in advance”, as historian Timothy Snyder would say.
Scholars, students, journalists, businesses and civil society must be united to defend against and communicate this threat to ordinary Americans. Given that the changes could also result in a long-term decline in the US economy, business leaders and economists should condemn these regressive plans. US academia must mobilise itself within and between sectors to defend academic freedom issues, and communicate the importance of human interaction and interpersonal communication in education.
The conservatives’ success here spells disaster for the world. Successful authoritarian capture of academia in such a powerful liberal democracy could inspire right-wing political attacks on education globally. The American moral panic over “critical race theory”, for example, became a political weapon that destabilised education policy development in Australia, and we have also seen the authoritarian takeover of education in Hungary. As Trump’s changes unfurl, the UN and its member states must take the lead in condemning measures which unpick the education system and threaten free expression globally. More broadly, we need an international movement of those who embrace low-tech alternatives and who are willing to disrupt “the machine” in sectors where lives, jobs and critical human knowledge are threatened by technofascism.
14 Nov 24 | News and features, United States
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
06 Nov 24 | News and features, United States
Waking up to today’s news that Donald Trump has been re-elected as president of the USA is deeply troubling. Despite what he claims, Trump is no poster boy for free speech. We at Index have many grave concerns about what another four years under him could mean for the USA and the world.
The first of these concerns is media freedom. His record on this is worrying. During his last term as president, Trump constantly appeared on our website and in our magazine. David E. McCraw, the New York Times deputy general counsel, spoke to us about the physical violence journalists were facing in the USA as a result of Trump; the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Nina Khrushcheva, wrote about his lashing out at various mainstream media with labels like “enemy of the people” and even said life in the Soviet Union was better in this regard:
“Once a Soviet citizen, I’ve been checking my surroundings. Am I living in cosmopolitan New York? Am I back in a homogeneous Moscow reading the Pravda headlines about the drummed-up victories of the communist state and the denunciations of the enemies who plot to take it down? In fact, when I was growing up in the 1970s, not even Pravda used such ominous language for Kremlin critics.”
Alas if Trump is to be taken at his word, his first four years in power were simply the dress rehearsal before the real show. Project 25, the Republican Party’s 900-page policy wish-list, includes plans to seize journalists’ emails and phones, while campaign-trail Trump frequently railed against the media, threatening to arrest those who disparage him and to strip television networks of their broadcast licenses. This might partly explain why Jeff Bezos crushed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Self-censorship is after all self-preservation.
This Sunday Trump said he wouldn’t have minded if journalists had been shot during his assassination attempt.
Such language incites. Reporters have spoken about feeling very unsafe at Trump rallies. Such language is also not limited to the media. His desire to throw people in jail extends to his detractors more broadly and is often personal. His campaign team claims his “firing squad” comment towards former US Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney has been taken out of context. Perhaps. Still there is no denying that he launched a vicious attack, solely because she was on Team Kamala.
This leads onto our broader concerns for freedom of expression in the USA. Minority voices will be further marginalised. So too will the voices of those who simply wish to criticise Trump or pull up his administration when it falls short. Even the best administrations fall short. Never mind ones staffed with conspiracists and liars. The implications are terrifying.
All the while Trump’s particular style of “noisy” leadership feels structurally built to erode USA democracy. In Umberto Eco’s essay Censorship and Silence, the Italian twentieth century scholar argued that too much information was an intentional tactic. Noise becomes an instrument of censorship and a tool of totalitarianism. It drowns out what we should be hearing. Trump likely knows this; his constant chatter is, many believe, done on purpose, the chaos it creates aimed at frustrating and distracting the public.
This does not just concern people in the USA. It concerns all of us, especially anyone living under dictatorships. Autocrats benefit from our distraction. Is it any surprise that, with our attention fixed on Israel-Palestine and indeed the USA, Saudi Arabia has carried out the highest number of executions this year since 1990 and that few have spoken about this?
Moving forward our fears deepen for those who live in totalitarian states and we fear too for people in Ukraine, the Baltics and in the Middle East given Trump’s allegiances in those regions.
Trump was voted in – but concerns have been raised about how fair the election was, starting with accusations once again of Russian meddling, the fact that one of Trump’s biggest supporters (Elon Musk) runs a highly influential social media platform and offered money to people voting in swing states, and stories of ballot boxes being set on fire. But in the grand scheme of elections, where countries like North Korea don’t hold any, it is undeniable that the USA’s 2024 ones were closer to free and fair.
That his election was democratic provides no solace, however. The world is not short on examples of autocrats who received a popular vote at the start. Victor Orban. Narendra Modi. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A vote is only one function of a democratic system and it is all too often imperfect.
As newspaper columnists address what led to this moment we pledge to work tirelessly to hold Trump to account on free speech.
When Index was launched in the early 1970s our mission was always to look at censorship everywhere and to not assume that we in the so-called West will have freedoms tomorrow just because we have them today. In the decades since we have tirelessly reported on and promoted free expression. We’ve successfully campaigned to change laws, to free prisoners of conscience, to get people off death row. We will continue to work in this way and we will report on every violation to free speech that Donald Trump and those in his government make. We will do our best to ensure the right to free expression does not bear the brunt of his presidency.
We know we need to make the case for free speech even stronger too. It is simply not good enough that the loudest voices talking about free speech are the very voices that want to dismantle it.
Today is a day of despair. It is also a day for collective action, for those of us who genuinely care about free speech to come together to protect and promote it. Please join us.
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04 Nov 24 | News and features, United States
Patriotism hasn’t been a standard stance of the Democrats, and especially not of their left flank. But front and centre issues in this election – freedom and democracy – are two words that have become the mantra of the Democratic standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris. There may be many reasons for this transformation, or this embrace, but I would venture that the main reason is that a second Trump presidency is so profoundly dangerous to the notions of democracy and freedom that make the United States the nation that we are. These two notions are intertwined – the American experiment is one that put the citizen at the core of our national experience. Our very citizenry is at risk.
The battle lines are drawn. This will be a close election, way closer than it should be, considering the credentials of the two candidates – Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president and convicted criminal Donald Trump. But America is a divided nation, with a profoundly dangerous fissure among a disenfranchised white working class conjoined with a cynical white business class, versus, well, the rest of us.
It’s perhaps extraordinary that we have never since our founding seen our freedom and democracy at risk as we do now. The Republican candidate Trump has made clear that if he is re-elected, he will put in jeopardy everything from the right to vote to the right to an abortion, the right to read what you want and the right to teach in the classroom even the most basic of civics lessons. His plans are so massive that there is very little that will be left off his agenda.
It’s important to understand that the Trump candidacy is the tip of a movement in America that seeks to take us backwards. With a Republican party totally in his grip, and a determined activist base, this is an anti-freedom movement that must be squashed so that the United States can fulfill its most basic self-professed promise of democracy.
The blueprint for a second Trump term is found in a massive document called Project 2025 prepared by the right wing Heritage Foundation. Among the policy plans are defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, shuttering of the Department of Education, so that “education decisions are made by families,” along with the gutting of the national public education system.
Abortion of course is at even more risk than it is already, since we are living with the legacy of the first Trump campaign and his packing of the US Supreme Court with anti-choice justices. There is a proposal by the Trump campaign to create a National Anti-Abortion Coordinator while also forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. (In some states, doctors are already at legal risk for providing health care to pregnant women). He has endorsed using the Comstock Act, a 19th century relic that censors free speech, to enforce abortion by making it a crime to promote or receive abortion pills across state lines.
The freedom to learn is already at risk, also a legacy of the first Trump term. Imagine things to get so much worse if there is a second term. According to PEN, the writer advocacy group, “Since the fall of 2021, PEN America has counted over 10,000 book bans in schools across the country. The full impact of the book ban movement is greater than can be counted, as ‘wholesale bans’ in which entire classrooms and school libraries have been suspended, closed, or emptied of books, either permanently or temporarily, restricted access to untold numbers of books in classrooms and school libraries Overwhelmingly, book banners target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
This has trickled down into communities all across America. Teachers are afraid to teach in classrooms across the country (see p102). Public school and small town libraries are being stripped of books deemed inappropriate by those who want to limit knowledge. School boards are among the fiercest election platforms, often with groups that appear to be grassroots but are otherwise funded by those allied with the Trumpist movement.
And finally, at risk is that most basic of rights, the right to vote. The USA is already the most repressive democracy in the world regarding access to voting. Under a Trump regime, it will become even more so.
Trump, as we know so well, tried to steal the last election. Now, under plain sight, he and his allies are plotting to do the same – packing electoral panels and trying to manipulate state election laws. There will be key challenges in states known as battleground states that could go either Democratic or Republican, like Georgia and Arizona. The arcane system of the electoral college is vulnerable to this manipulation in ways we never have seen before Trump’s emergence on the world stage. To challenge this, the Harris campaign has added an army of lawyers. Their immediate focus is to challenge the right to vote in key states where the Trump campaign is litigating against it. The second focus will be on the myriad of challenges that Trump plans to throw up regarding the actual vote count and legitimacy of the vote itself. As the New York Times recently reported: “The battle over whose votes count – not just how many votes are counted – has become central to modern presidential campaigns,” as a legacy to the Trump phenomenon.
When the election results are challenged, the deciding bench will be the US Supreme Court, the most conservative and anti-democratic court in our nation’s history. Were he to win a second term, his legacy would impact generations far into the future.
